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I traveled to Nashville in August for a conference, and the city’s reputation as a music center made me think I would sink a lot of cash shopping for records.

That was not the case.

I did, however, come away with a battered copy of Don’t Come a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind) by Loretta Lynn.

Every cable channel music documentary that features Lynn always mention two songs — “The Pill” and the title track of Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’. Both songs got Lynn in hot water with the tender sensibilities of country radio.

It’s actually not the most confrontational track on the album.

That would go to “I Got Caught” — a bouncy, scathing tune about infidelity that also comments on gender inequality. That is, men can get away with cheating, but women cannot.

Most of my country music collection consists of Emmylou Harris albums, and she was the first artist to sink a lot of cash into making quality-sounding records.

Lynn, by contrast, cut her teeth in an era when artists recorded an entire album of material in three days. The speed at which she tosses out one broken-hearted ditty after another is breathtaking.

Throughout the album, she’s a wronged woman, but she explores the spectrum of the broken heart experience — pity, rage, acceptance, even liberation. On “The Shoe Goes on the Other Foot Tonight”, Lynn wonders if “two wrongs can make a right.”

With no track exceeding three minutes, there’s an almost punk rock sensibility to Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’. Lynn makes her point right quick — you’re no good, I’m sad, but I will prevail.

When I spotted a vinyl copy of Harder Than You in the bargain bin at Jive Time Records, it had been close to 30 years since I first heard of 24-7 Spyz.

Living Colour was all over the radio with “Cult of Personality”, but the music press pointed out Vernon Reid and company weren’t the only rock band with black guys around. Fishbone would release its second album, Truth and Soul, that year as well. Bad Brains had been around since the start of the decade.

24-7 Spyz tapped into the same creative vein as Living Colour — brutal guitars, funk bass lines and punctuating drums. In some ways, Harder Than You and Vivid are nearly interchangeable. Each album even includes a cover, although the Spyz driving cover of Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” is truly transformative.

I remember Pulse! magazine plugging the hell out of this album with prominent advertising, glowing reviews and more than a few blurbs about the band. I don’t remember seeing the album itself in my local Tower stores, however. Its release on an independent label just about guaranteed it wouldn’t reach Honolulu.

24-7 Spyz would eventually sign to a major label, by which time the line-up that produced Harder Than You had changed. The work from this brief era can be found on streaming services, but the band’s early output remains offline.

Between INXS and Midnight Oil, you couldn’t blame a major label artist and repertoire representative for trying to mine Australia for the next college rock success story.

I’m not sure where I heard about Boom Crash Opera, but I suspect it was probably in Pulse! magazine. Similar to Love and Money, I spotted a single for “Onion Skin” at Tower Records and thought, “This looks interesting enough.”

I was expecting Midnight Oil or Icehouse, but I ended up with something funkier and way more boisterous. I thought about picking up the band’s 1989 album These Here Are Crazy Times, but it lost out to many other releases that year.

Boom Crash Opera fell off my radar completely till I spotted the band’s self-titled debut at the Lifelong Thrift Shop. For $1, it seemed worth the risk, plus Alex Sadkin was listed as one of the producers. Sadkin worked with Duran Duran on Seven and the Ragged Tiger.

True to form, Sadkin’s studio wizardry coats Boom Crash Opera with an appealing sheen, but he doesn’t water down the band’s hard, funky sound. If I had been introduced to Boom Crash Opera with this album rather than “Onion Skin”, I might have become a casual fan. The writing on Boom Crash Opera is solid, and while the album’s production is an artifact of its time, it skews toward the era’s better angels.

Boom Crash Opera is still around and pretty much sticks to Australia these days. None of the band’s international releases are in print, nor available on streaming services.

Back in 1986, you probably would have heard me bad-mouthing Don Johnson’s hit single, “Heartbeat.”

Johnson was the star of Miami Vice, a show created after a television executive jotted down the phrase “MTV cops”. It was a great show, critically-acclaimed at the time, but who could take its lead actor seriously as an actual MTV star?

I was a rock snob in training, but even I could recognize the folly of it.

Johnson was ubiquitous back then. Guys dressed like his character, Sonny Crockett, because evidently girls dug guys in pastels. I wasn’t immune to the craze either, except I also dug guys dressed in pastels.

Johnson’s second single, “Heartache Away”, featured the actor in a promotional video singing plaintively with flashbacks to a hot sex scene. It really exploited his sex symbol currency, and I didn’t mind a bit.

I really wanted to buy the album, but I had already declared out loud how ridiculous I found it. Three years later, the show was canceled.

I didn’t think about it again till I spotted a vinyl copy at the Lifelong Thrift Store. I hesitated at first because of that residual skepticism, but $0.25 was a price point low enough to take a risk.

Modern country radio has a more direct lineage to hard rock and hair metal from the ’80s than actual country music from the ’60s. Heartbeat could very well be subtitled The Shape of Country to Come. Tim McGraw could totally work the chorus of “Last Sound Love Makes”, and the only thing missing from “Lost In Your Eyes” and “Star Tonight” is slide guitar.

In that sense, Heartbeat is prophetic. Johnson wouldn’t give Blake Shelton any sleepless nights where vocals are concerned, but there’s a twang in his delivery that wouldn’t sound out of place on a country hitmaker.

Back in 1986, Heartbeat could be a considered a sad conclusion to Rick Springfield’s promise of pop-friendly hard rock. Instead, it’s a fascinating artifact on how ’80s rock would pivot into modern country.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but sometimes, the cover is incentive enough.

The Sibling Rivalry Collection Race precluded me from getting Steve Winwood’s Roll With It when it was released in 1988. My brother had already called dibs on Back in the High Life, which made Winwood his exclusive.

I feigned a lack of interest anyway because Winwood was at the peak of his solo career, and I had started my exploration of college rock by then. Winwood, by virtue of topping the charts, was immediately deemed square.

Except, he was kind of hot.

Not hot in the George Michael/Duran Duran sense of hot. More like a Robert Palmer/Huey Lewis kind of hot.

The cover of Roll With It dolled him up to look dangerous, but the back cover of the album drew my attention.

The album title is in the way, so let’s clear that up a bit.

Yup. I would have bought this album for a crotch shot. (An arse shot, too, now that we look closer.)

Would I have cared one whit about the music? Perhaps. At least, I would have pretended to.

In terms of hits singles, Roll With It didn’t have quite the same staying power as Back in the High Life, and I don’t think the cross promotion with a beer company did any favors to “Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do?” Reviews of the album weren’t enthusiastic, but sales-wise, it managed to ride the coattails of its predecessor.

I left the album on the store shelf safe in the knowledge that I just wasn’t the target audience, despite how much I wanted to stare at that crotch.

I have no such reluctance 29 years later, especially when a nice 12×12 LP cover can be had for $1 at the Lifelong AIDS Alliance Thrift Store. I could probably find a store clerk who would understand.

You heard a song on the radio. If you liked it, you bought the single. You heard more songs by the same artist. If you liked those songs as well, you bought the album.

What happens, then, when you stop listening to the radio? Easy — keep buying singles without hearing the song!

That’s how I encountered Love and Money. I was browsing the singles section of Tower Records, looking for something that might scratch my itch for non-American bands. The single to “Hallelujah Man” had a decent enough sleeve, and a name like Love and Money didn’t scream hair metal or radio pop.

So I bought it. I liked what I heard, but I wasn’t entirely convinced to sink a week and a half’s allowance on a full album. No other singles were released from the album in the US.

It would be another 28 years before I encountered Love and Money again. The album from which “Hallelujah Man” was taken, titled Strange Kind of Love, was sitting in a bin at the Lifelong Thrift Shop for $1. I spent that much on the single.

After an initial listen, I was intrigued by the band’s mix of British white soul and post-punk, as if the missing link between Johnny Hates Jazz and the Smiths were somehow unearthed. Another few spins made me seek out a CD.

“Hallelujah Man” was a decent enough single, but the title track and “Jocelyn Square” performed better on the UK charts for good reason. “Up Escalator” imagines what ABC would sound like with harder guitars and no horns, while the last vestiges of post-punk drive the adult contemporary cool of “Avalanche”. James Grant’s smooth voice could make him the captain of your heart.

Love and Money arrived a bit too late to capitalize on the revived British invasion early in the ’80s, and the light jazz radio format that emerged in the latter part of the decade flared out before it could do any good for the band.

So Love and Money remained a somewhat successful act on the other side of the ocean. I’m surprised someone had actually owned a copy of Strange Kind of Love to end up donating to the thrift store.

In 1988, the Sugarcubes, Kronos Quartet, Living Colour and In Tua Nua vied for my attention. Still, I’m a little disappointed in my youthful self for not following up on that blind single purchase. I think I would have liked the album, and it could have very well endured a number of collection purges to persist to this day.

One of the most influential issues published by Pulse magazine was a supplement covering the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Those 20-some odd pages was my encyclopedia of the downtown New York scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Of course, I had no means to listen to any of the music described in that guide. Tower Records had a wide-reaching stock, but downtown New York albums just didn’t reach Honolulu unless it was released on a major label, i.e. Nonesuch.

Soldier String Quartet was one of those ensembles mentioned in Pulse, and my burgeoning interest in Kronos Quartet made me curious about Soldier as well. I wouldn’t spot any of their albums in the wild till I lived in New York City from 1992 to 1993. I had to leave them on the shelf because I was living on a student income (read: parents’ money).

I had honestly forgotten about Soldier String Quartet till I was flipping through the stacks of Crossroads Music in Portland, Ore. I spotted Sequence Girls selling for $6, and I had to sate my curiosity once and for all.

Kronos traces its lineage back to Josef Haydn, but Soldier can only draw a tenuous link to that tradition. With bass and drums augmenting the quartet, Sequence Girls is clearly a rock album. The quartet plays with a lot of fire, and David Soldier’s original works can get crunchy.

The album also includes arrangements of delta blues songs from Muddy Waters, Skip James and Charley Patton that don’t attempt to clean up the source material.

In addition to performing Soldier originals, the quartet premiered works by the likes of Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins and Fred Frith. Wikipedia mentions Soldier String Quartet served as a training ground for other ensembles, at one time employing Regina Carter, and the’ve appeared on Guided by Voices albums.

It doesn’t look like Sequence Girls was ever reissued on CD, but it is distributed digitally through CD Baby.

I’ve been a Madonna fan since 1990, but it’s taken me 26 years to include True Blue in my collection.

I probably wouldn’t have if I didn’t find a decent copy on vinyl at the Lifelong AIDS Alliance Thrift Store selling for $6. That was a price point with which I could live, and it was for charity.

I can’t disentangle the heavy marketing of the album at the time of its release with its critical reputation over time. The album contained only nine tracks, but 2/3 of them were released as singles, all of them played to within an inch of their lives on radio.

“La Isla Bonita” is the only track that really caught my imagination, and it’s still a favorite. The synth strings of “Papa Don’t Preach” also put it in a class above the other tracks on the album. Otherwise, I’m not entirely convinced the songs which have become Madonna canon really deserve their spots.

“Live to Tell” shows up on numerous Madonna compilations, but the track has always left me underwhelmed. Music from the 80s was often accused of being cold and robotic because of its over-reliance on synthesizers and MIDI. “Live to Tell” would certainly be guilty of this accusation.

Bill Frisell did a tremendous job infusing humanity in the song, replacing the brief, ambient middle section of the original with an extended downtown New York freak-out.

The title track is something of an ear worm, but it’s not the strongest song on the album. It didn’t even make the cut on The Immaculate Collection. Does anyone even remember “Where’s the Party?” being a single?

Unlike Like a Virgin, the non-single tracks on True Blue don’t attempt to be anything other than filler. I’m pretty baffled by the gangster movie samples in “White Heat”. They made more sense on I’m Breathless.

Marketing muscle made True Blue a success, but without it, I’m not sure its excellent bits are enough to make up for its middling moments.

I played Tracy Chapman’s self-titled debut a lot when it was released in 1988.

I had a few weeks to get through John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for a summer reading assignment in high school. Tracy Chapman served as a soundtrack to my reading. I wouldn’t have gotten through it otherwise.

The album grew on me as a result, but I wasn’t quite convinced I wanted to be a Tracy Chapman fan in the long term. Crossroads arrived a year later, and all the reviews I read at the time gave it damning praise: more of the same as the previous album, perhaps a bit more dour.

So I passed on it.

The last few years of flipping through vinyl stacks would bring Crossroads to my attention time and again, and each encounter would get me more curious.

First, I love the cover. It’s a striking photo of Chapman, more strident than the washed out sepia portrait of her debut. Also, the album’s modest success makes it a bargain on the second-hand market.

My decisive encounter with Crossroads would be at Everyday Music. I finally brought it to the in-store player to give it a sample and discovered Emmylou Harris had covered “All That You Have Is Your Soul” on All That I Intended to Be. That was endorsement enough for me.

The reviews were right — Crossroads picks up where Tracy Chapman left off, but the critics were wrong to imply that was a fault of the album. Chapman’s writing chops remained sharp, perhaps even getting a bit tender.

While Tracy Chapman is in a league of its own, Crossroads is just as enjoyable as her 1995 album New Beginnings. If anything, these three albums constitute her essential works.

Like Demo 1979 before it, this unofficial live album from Duran Duran surprised me when I found it while flipping through the stacks at Jive Time Records. It’s housed in a generic sleeve with a photocopy of the track listing taped to the front, and it isn’t even an accurate listing.

The Duran Duran Wiki says it was recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon in December 1981. At one point during the concert, Simon Le Bon refers to “Last Chance on the Stairway” as “a new song”.

That was a transitionary time for the band. The biggest hits had yet to be written, so the set list includes three b-sides from the self-titled debut. The erroneous “Instrumental Jam” listed at the end of Side A actually consists of “Late Bar” and “Khanada”. “Faster Than Light” and “To The Shore” round out the once and future rarities.

The band is on fire in this performance, tearing through the songs with the exuberance captured on Arena. The rough edges from the 1979 demo had been smoothed out.

I’ve seen Duran Duran a number of times, and the rarest song I’ve heard them play is “Friends of Mine”. So it’s a treat to hear b-sides part of a set list. I probably won’t fall down the rabbit hole of collecting Duran Duran bootlegs as a result of this purchase, but I’m glad I got to hear something other than the hits done live.